Funding awarded for research on bagworms, bubonic plague, ancient mammals and a repository of changing seasons

Florida Museum of Natural History

Researchers at the Florida Museum of Natural History and collaborating institutions have been collectively awarded $2,090,402 in funding from the National Science Foundation this month. Awards were distributed to faculty members in archaeology, vertebrate paleontology, Lepidoptera, biodiversity informatics and artificial intelligence.

Bagmoths complete their life cycle in the strangest way possible

There are often stark physical differences between the sexes of a given species. Male and female eclectus parrots have such astonishingly different plumage that they were considered different species for over thirty years. Female cone bushes have thicker leaves and branches than males and use them to supply extra energy and water to their fruit, which remain on the plant until they are removed by wildfires. And there’s as much as an 83-fold difference in size between female blanket octopi, known to be up to 6 feet in length, and males, which grow to the size of bottlecaps.

But few organisms take sexual dimorphism to the extremes found in bagworms. Florida Museum curator of Lepidoptera, Akito Kawahara, and curator of education, Megan Ennes, received funding to study and teach the natural history of this strange group of moths.

Bagworms get their name from the silk houses constructed by their larvae, to which they attach various sticks, leaves and other organic detritus. Male larvae undergo the normal metamorphosis into adult moths, but the females of many species only partially transform. Some are born without wings, while others lack wings, antennae, legs and mouths.

Working with colleagues, Kawahara and Ennes will trace the evolutionary history of bagworms. This will include determining how species in this group are related, the molecular cause of arrested development in females and which changes in DNA structure led to this extreme form of sexual dimorphism. The grant will also fund several education initiatives, including a multiyear exhibit, a digital comic strip and an illustrated book for children.

How did ancient mammals fare during rapid climate change?

Roughly 56 million years ago, temperatures abruptly rose by as much as 8 degrees Celsius, vastly altering ecosystems on Earth’s continents and oceans.  

Jonathan Bloch, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the museum, and Arthur Porto, curator of artificial intelligence for natural history and biodiversity, were awarded funding to study how mammal communities responded to this period of sudden and intense global warming, called the Paleocene/Eocene thermal maximum.

Research crews from the Florida Museum have collected more than 20,000 vertebrate fossils from the Bighorn Basin in Wyoming that were preserved immediately before, during and after this interval of warming.

Bloch, Porto and their colleagues will develop and use new artificial intelligence software to analyze these fossils and search for hidden patterns. They’ll use these data to determine how functional diversity — which measures the range of ways organisms use resources in their environment — was altered in mammal communities during the warming event. Paleontology studies of this scope are rare, and results will have significant implications for the ways in which plants and animals respond to modern climate change.

What the black death can tell us about how outbreaks spread

Disease outbreaks are strongly influenced by the landscape in which they take place. This includes everything from climatic and land use patterns to population density and migration rates.

To make things even more complicated, all of these factors are simultaneously influencing each other. Changes in climate, for example, often lead to food shortages and wars, making people more susceptible to diseases and more likely to transmit them over long distances. This complexity has made it difficult for scientists and historians to determine how diseases have spread in the past and to predict the ways in which future outbreaks will unfold.

But new advancements in artificial intelligence are making it easier to collect and analyze this data. Nicolas Gauthier, curator of artificial intelligence at the Florida Museum, has received funding to digitally re-create the 14th century outbreak of bubonic plague thousands of times.

Gauthier and his colleagues will do this by combining archaeological, historical and paleoenvironmental data and analyzing the similarities and differences among the virtual outbreaks. They will also include subsequent bubonic plagues, such as the Great Plague of London in 1665 and 1666 and an outbreak that spread across most of Europe and Asia in the 19th century. Gabriela Hamerlinck, a professor in the University of Florida’s geography department, will use the discoveries made during the project and others like it to create dynamic content that engages student.

The information gained during the project will then be used to create a predictive model for future outbreaks of any disease, both to increase preparedness and reduce casualties. 

Tracking the effects of climate change on biodiversity? There’s an app for that

Over the last century, prudent individuals have created perpetual data repositories that document the ways in which ecosystems are changing along with climate. Using this global equivalent of a stethoscope, scientists can predict how plants and animals will respond to future changes as well. But to accurately take the planet’s pulse, everyone has to pitch in.

The USA National Phenology Network was created in 2007 and contains more than 35 million records collected by thousands of people in the United States. It includes observations on when plants produce leaves and flowers, when animals become active in spring and dormant in autumn, and how the distributions of both plants and animals are being altered by climate change.

But there’s a problem. Citizen scientist platforms like iNaturalist don't require much work on the part of participants, but the National Phenology Network has rigorous data standards that can make it difficult to upload observations. In practice, this means only people with an abundance of time and resources to spare are able to contribute, resulting in fewer records and spotty coverage.

Robert Guralnick, the Florida Museum’s curator of bioinformatics, hopes to change that. With funding from NSF, he and his colleagues plan to completely redesign the network’s smartphone app, called Nature’s Notebook, to make it easier and more intuitive to use. Changes will allow users to level up and earn badges while learning how to collect data. The revised app will also have integrated connections to social media platforms and a direct pipeline to iNaturalist, allowing users to share observations, get help with identifying organisms and interact with other users.